


Out of the Sky

by Anna__S



Category: The 100 (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-29
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 11:38:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2691539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She used to sleep under the floor and now there is nothing above her but the stars</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Set in some not-so-distant future. Assumes knowledge of all aired episodes. 
> 
> Hello new fandom.

 

 

Earth is less of a shock to her than the others. She spent the first sixteen years of her life in a five by ten room; everywhere she goes seems like a foreign landscape.

But it’s still a shock.  The first thing she notices is how different the air tastes. For once, she gulps in deep breathes, just for the pleasure of it, for the sharp, crisp feel of the breeze in her lungs.

When night arrives, it occurs to her that the artificial schedule of bedtimes and wake-up calls that they’ve lived by all these years is rooted in something real.

And when she’s startled out of sleep by the chirping, babbling birds, she’s reminded of the noises Bellamy used to mumble to her when she couldn’t sleep, soothing, nonsense sounds from deep in the back of his throat. And she knows, they never belonged to space; they belonged here, and their bodies knew it even when they didn’t.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Before he leaves, her brother orders her to stay behind. She wants to point out the hypocrisy of his obsession with her safety, but settles for rolling her eyes. 

She’s already begged and cried and pleaded. She told him how she stuck one Reaper right in the belly and he bled and bled, but she learned all of her stubbornness from Bellamy, and nobody else, not even Clarke is willing to fight for a seventeen-year old girl’s right to risk her life.  

“Promise me that while we’re gone, you’ll stay here,” he repeats.  

She tries to storm by him, but he grabs her arm, his fingers tightening painfully around her elbow.

“Promise me, O,” he says, reverting to his kinder, gentler self, using the voice of the big brother who used to croon her to sleep. 

Slowly, she nods and he lets out a sharp breath as his hand curls around the gun in his arms.  “Thank you. We won’t be gone long, I promise.”

Octavia makes it one night in the camp before the restlessness returns, like an itch buried deep under her skin.  Too many nights of her life have been spent in one room.  And the first thing she did when she came back, was find a gap in the fence big enough to fit a girl with narrow hips and malnutrition-stunted growth.

As she reaches the fence and the hum of electricity turns into a deafening buzz, she hears footsteps behind her and swings around.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asks Raven.

“Let me guess, Bellamy told you to watch me.” 

Raven shrugs.

“You really think you can catch me with that gimp leg of yours,” Octavia challenges her, still rocking on her toes, wondering just how fast Raven can run in that brace.

“Probably not. But I think you’ll be surprised by how loud I can yell.”

“Just because _you’re_ stuck here, doesn’t mean I should be. I have as much right to fight them as anybody else. More.”

“That might be true, but I don’t want to have to tell your brother I lost you. I don’t know if you know this, but your brother is a serious pain in the ass.”

“You can just tell him I drugged you with roots from my Grounder boyfriend.” Raven laughs, but still looks uncertain, glancing at the knife tied around Octavia’s waist. “That was my back-up plan anyway,” she adds.

Raven takes a step back and closes her eyes. “Okay, you win. I never saw anything, kid.”

Without a word, Octavia spins on her heels, running straight for the gap, and she doesn’t stop until the camp is just another shadow in the inky darkness.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t find Bellamy’s squad, but she finds a pair of Reapers. For a second, she hesitates, surveying them from her crouched position.  Her odds aren’t good, but then, even before she was born, her odds were never great. 

When she charges them, she screams Lincoln’s name and the familiar feel of his name in her mouth gives her courage.  She hacks and hacks until her arms are sticky with blood, hers and theirs, and all she can see is red and then the world goes black. 

She wakes up strapped to a stranger’s back.  With every breath she takes, she tastes his skin, and it is salty and gritty, like the earth. 

When she looks down at her hands, she sees that they are still stained bright red. Even her fingernails are crusted with blood and her body aches all the way down to the bone. She recognizes the pungent smell of the healing salve Lincoln used on her, smeared thickly across most of her exposed skin. 

She wonders if this is a rescue or a kidnapping before she remembers that it almost always works out the same in the end.

 

  

* * *

 

 

For days, she walks behind him, keeping the rope between them taut, even when her lungs are burning.  Lincoln told her that the Grounders admire strength and boldness.

“You don’t walk like them,” he says in a grunt. It’s the first full sentence he’s said to her. 

The lower half of his face is completely obscured by a crude mask carved from bark, but his eyes shine out from the dark hollows formed by the streaks of war paint and they are soft and curious. 

“I know one of your people.  A man. I lov-“ she breaks off, and it’s not an act, although it was supposed to be. “The Reapers took him. That’s why I was attacking them when you caught me.” She kicks at the ground, sending stones skittering into the woods. 

“There were rumors that one of the Sky People was with one of ours.”

“That was me,” she says and meets his eyes defiantly.   “He taught me how to move, how to fight, how to survive here, like one of you.”

She shakes her wrists at him. She has survived this far by surprising all of them, even herself. “If you untie me, I can help you.” 

He laughs at that, a deep belly laugh that makes the rope connecting them sway and shake. 

Beyond him, she spies something. She doesn’t know what exactly, but something about the way the light is filtering through the trees is wrong. 

The words fly out of her mouth before she even realizes what she’s seeing. “Duck,” she screams.  The first arrow is already coming and she can’t help, her hands are literally tied. She crouches down behind a tree and can actually feel the whoosh of air as an arrow buries itself deep into the ground inches from her feet.  

He is running towards the attackers, hurling metal discs with deadly accuracy as he sprints through the trees.  Within a few minutes, he’s returned with a quiver full of fresh arrows.

It occurs to her that she could’ve run and she’s not exactly sure why she didn’t.

That night, he offers her the first share of fresh squirrel and she accepts. While she bites into the charred skin, he stares at the scabbed over cuts scattered across her arms and shoulders as if he’s never seen them before, as if he wasn’t responsible for healing her.

“You should’ve died from all that blood you lost. Your people must heal quickly,” he says.

“We heal the same as you. I’m just stubborn.”  

He pauses, still considering her.  “My name is Gregor,” he says, finally.

She tells him her name in their language, and wishes she’d paid more attention when Lincoln tries to teach her the other basics.  She thought they would have so much time. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 On the fifth day of walking, Gregor lets her walk beside him, instead of behind him. 

That night, she holds out her small hands and asks him to free her.

“These ropes are slowing me down. I promise I won’t run,” she says and it’s a lie, she’ll always run eventually, but maybe she’ll stay for a while first. “I want vengeance on the Reapers. You say they’re your people’s enemy and that you are going to fight them, if that’s true, then I want to help you.”

He studies her face carefully for almost a full minute before nodding. As he cuts away her manacles, she rubs her wrists, trying to soothe the sore, chapped skin there, but she stops when she realizes he’s watching her. 

After he decides to trust her, they move more quickly, but his camp is still a full three-day’s walk away. He doesn’t belong to one of the local tribes; he was sent by his camp’s leaders to learn more about the dangerous strangers who had appeared in the forest. 

When he tells her this, he adds, “but they didn’t expect me to bring one of the back.” He smiles at her.  “Although you're not like the other Sky People I was told about.”

What she doesn’t tell him is that she was never one of them to begin with.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She survives her first snowstorm with his clan, huddled under thick layers of blankets.  In such a confined space, it’s hard for them to hold onto their fear of her. 

After the cold eases, she spends months learning how to slip quietly unseen through the woods, how to turn herself into another shadow. She stains her face black with berries and smears mud across the planes of her face. Her hands harden and crack. Gregor shows her how to handle her knife, when to use the point and when to use the flat edge. He lends her his arrows and when she brings down her first five-footed rabbit, he turns its winter-white coat into slippers for her.

She could run. Sometimes, she even makes it out of the camp, her feet stumbling over tree roots, her mind full of Bellamy, before she remembers the bars above her head.  A world that only ever wanted to put her in some kind of cage.    

And when spring arrives, they let her join the Reaper hunting squads without a second thought, like she’s neither fragile nor a freak. That whole long day of marching, her blood crackles, adrenaline coursing through her. 

She doesn’t know how many of them she hits with arrows, but when she pierces a tall fighter through the neck with her spear, she whoops and they whoop with her. 

The tattoo to mark her first battle is agony like she’s never known. Her body throbs and pulsates until it feels like even her heartbeat has been swallowed by the spikes of pain. She screams and they laugh. Later, she learns that they put a small dose of poison in every time, to build up your immunity.

The second tattoo burns, but she clenches her fists and bares her teeth, growling at the crowd gathered around her, and this time they cheer for her, their lucky, crazy Sky girl. 

The fifth barely stings at all.

  

 

* * *

 

Eventually, they don’t mind if she leaves, as long as she promises to come back. It’s the closest thing to a home that she can fathom wanting.  

She walks beyond their territory, through the forest, to the edges of the hot, scorched dunes.  She used to sleep under the floor, and now there is nothing above her but the stars.

  

* * *

 

 

She spies him once, from a perch high in a tree. 

From that angle, all she can see of his face is the familiar line of his jaw, but she would know him just from his walk, from the way his shoulders jut forwards. Once upon a time, it was the only thing she knew.

For a moment, her knees bend, her desire to find him, reassure him, overwhelming all of her other instincts, but before she even takes one step down, she retreats.  His people will kill her before she ever reaches him, and even if they miss, her people won’t.    

And he let her leave once, but she’s not sure he’d let her walk away again.

She watches him until his squad disappears over the ridge. His hair is cut shorter, like a soldier. The line is straight and even, and remembering how he would hack uselessly at his hair as a teen, she knows it’s not his handiwork. There aren't that many people Bellamy would let that close to him with scissors, and she shuts her eyes, picturing Clarke, maybe, or Raven, working on him.

She remembers him kneeling before her as she snipped at his dark curls, and with a sureness that hurts, she knows he must remember that too, every time.

  

* * *

 

 

When she was young, Bellamy used to tell her the story of a girl who fell from a star. 

At night, in her bed under the grates, deep in the belly of the ship, she would whisper herself his stories. It was comforting, like the thrum and whir of the ship’s engines pulsing in her ear.   She never knew if his tales were based on some familiar myth or if he made it up, if somehow even as a child, he knew exactly what she needed. 

Now, she tells his stories, and it is her story she is telling.

 

 


End file.
